1979 Wall Street Occupation

A certainly more playful sit-in in 1979:

This is a short clip from the film "Early Warnings" that details the sit-in that happened on Wall Street on the 50th Anniversary of the 1929 Stock Market Crash. The protesters were demanding an end to financial support for the nuclear industry and the action was part of the larger occupations at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant. The costumed figures on stilts are from the Bread and Puppet Theatre. The film is from Green Mountain Post Films.

The occupations at the nuclear power plant often numbered up to 4,000 people. The protests began in April of 1979, one month after the infamous Three Mile Island accident (Editor's Note: I see Three Mile Island in person literally every day).

As Occupy Wall Street quickly becomes considered the movement of our generation, it should be noted that sit-ins are a rather old idea. It's hard to deny their effect on the public debate, which should be the goal of any good protest. I just wonder what happens to the movement when, inevitably, people begin to leave Zucotti Park.

This, after all, is the central problem OWS faces. It's a movement that has become about politics and, therefore, political solutions. But the troubles our generation face are not necessary political; ours is an existential crisis.

If you haven't read Noreen Malone's terrific cover story in New York, "The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright", I strongly suggest you take the time to do so. An excerpt:

And so we find ourselves living among the scattered ashes and spilled red wine and broken glass from a party we watched in our pajamas, peering down the stairs at the grown-ups. This is not a morning after we are prepared for, to judge by the composite sketch sociologists have drawn of us. (Generation-naming is an inexact science, but generally we’re talking here about the first half of the Millennials, the terrible New Agey label we were saddled with in the eighties.) Clare has us pegged pretty well: We are self-centered and convinced of our specialness and unaccustomed to being denied. “I am sad, jaded, disillusioned, frustrated, and worried,” said one girl I talked to who feels “stuck” in a finance job she took as a stepping-stone to more-fulfilling work she now cannot find. Ours isn’t a generation that will give you just one adjective to describe our hurt.

Our generation is the first generation to expect to be worse off financially than our parents (those of us who grew up poor will speak for ourselves, thank you very much).  If the Lost Generation of WWI was dominated by alienation, this "Lost Generation" is dominated by pessimism. Although that narrative becomes harder to believe when you see the optimism in OWS. I suppose it's possible the protesters are merely the unemployed amongst us with nothing better to do for a month, but NPR's Planet Money blog points out that the nature of a live-in requires cooperation and equality:

We went to the big nightly meeting, which lasts for hours. Everybody has something to say. Along the lines of: Should we buy some sleeping bags? Why does that guy get to run the meeting? What if we just buy fabric and make our own sleeping bags? This kind of back and forth, people told us, is the whole point of Occupy Wall Street. It's not a movement; it's a venue. Standing around, talking about what everybody wants — this is a model of how the protesters want society to be.

Now obviously society as a whole cannot run on mutual participation and the supplies of the charitable for very long. But to believe so, to actually put in practice and have it work represents an astonishingly stiff belief in the inherent good in people. Perhaps one could say this just proves the naivete of a generation that grew up with Participation Awards and gold stars, but this nature of commune also requires equal work. There will always be those who take advantage of the system, but that's true of the societal system we have now. I'm not saying the thin structure of decision-making developed by OWS is a practical model for governments and economies, but it's hard to deny its inspiring nature.